This update reveals the cake has been traveling through a gauntlet of space rascals: a fish, a shuriken, a flame, and a cannon! Also, it adds a few graphics upgrades, including

• space rascal sprites
• warping transition between levels
• procedurally generated glowing light animation along line
• scrolling universe background
• portal to the next level at the end of the line
• cake explodes when colliding with a rascal
• icons for the game window and file

Most of the rascals are what I imagined they were during the jam. I intended the game to have a more substantial visual design than basic shapes and minimalist, abstract graphics, but I didn't have enough time to add all the things I wanted during the jam. All the sprites are 12 pixel squares (very small), so here they are zoomed in.

Do these sprites make it look like the programmer is also the artist (lol)? The fish is particularly goofy looking. Somehow these are all fully outlined in black despite being only 12 pixels wide. They didn't have to be, but drawing a black outline first has been a method that helps me with pixel art, and it's the most basic method of differentiating the foreground from the background (take, for example, a mouse cursor).  Here are the blades in action.

The glowing line is more of the usual kind of thing I make in pygame.  It's generated at level load time as 15 frames drawn onto a sequence of surfaces based on a random gradient and increasing offset. As the algorithm loops through offsets, the line is drawn from point to point using either white as the color or the gradient. The portal is created in a similar way using transparent ellipses. The line itself is a list of points generated by a bézier curve algorithm I found on the pygame wiki.  Since the line and the effect are built by the program, the colors change every time you play.

Lastly, I finally managed to get a modern OS X build created by using my roommate's computer. If you're on OS X 10.11 - 10.14, please give this a try. It was built with python 3.7, pygame and py2app for 64-bit architectures. If you're having trouble running any of the builds, leave a comment, and I'll be glad to help.